Jackie B. Grice had the title, the contracts, and the company. What she did not have, for years, was herself.
Grice and her husband built J. Diamond, Inc. operating as Agape Travel and Tours into a multimillion-dollar transportation company offering charter buses, shuttles, vans, black cars, and government contracts. By any measure, it was a success story. But inside that story was a woman who had quietly stopped tending to herself in order to tend to everything else.
A business built in a space not designed for them
The charter transportation industry is overwhelmingly white and male. Grice describes walking into rooms where the power dynamics were immediately clear where the men sitting across the table would direct their questions to her husband, treating her CEO title as largely ceremonial. Over time, she learned to let results speak louder than any objection to her presence. But that kind of constant navigation, even when successful, carries a cost.
The financial barriers alone were significant. Larger, more established companies in the industry nearly all run by white men benefited from preferred insurance rates and multi-generational networks. While competitors purchased fleets of 20 buses at a time, Grice’s company would buy three at roughly $700,000 each and still pay more to insure them. Minority operators had representation within the major industry associations, but it was segmented visible enough to appear inclusive, but never quite centered.
The performance of being fine
As a Black woman leading in that space, Grice had absorbed a familiar directive: be exceptional, be undeniable, and never slow down long enough to give anyone a reason to question whether you belong. She became the person who could handle everything. And for years, she did until the weight of handling everything began to hollow her out from the inside.
When the pandemic brought the business to a full stop in 2020, the silence it created was the first real pause she had experienced in years. In that stillness, she was forced to face what she had been too busy to acknowledge. She was exhausted not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually depleted. Her pastor encouraged her to take a journal, find a quiet place, and sit with no phone, no agenda, and no tasks for two days.
She sat outside under a tree in her yard. The first hours were deeply uncomfortable. Her mind kept reaching for something to manage, some problem to solve. She had been needed for so long that stillness felt almost foreign.
What the silence finally said
Then something shifted. In the quiet, she heard something she had not heard in years not pressure, not the next obligation, not the voice of an industry that had spent years making her prove she belonged. What she heard, she says, was clarity. A reminder that there was more to her than the performance of strength she had been maintaining for a world that had consistently demanded she work twice as hard to be seen as half as credible.
That experience under the tree became a turning point. She began to understand that the burnout she carried was not simply personal it was also structural. Black women leading in spaces where they were never the assumed default carry a particular and compounding kind of weight. They are not only running operations. They are managing perception, absorbing professional exclusions, and doing all of it while raising families, leading communities, and showing up in every space that needs them.
When she started having honest conversations with other high achieving Black women, the pattern was unmistakable. Nearly all of them had mastered the performance of being fine. None of them had truly given themselves permission to rest without guilt. Success, Grice found, does not insulate you from burnout. For Black women who have had to fight for every seat at every table, it often accelerates it because the drive that earns you the room does not automatically know how to stop once you arrive.
Building something new from the stillness
Out of that reckoning, Grice created Soul Sabbatical, a movement built around the belief that one of the most powerful things a high-achieving woman can do is learn to be still and hear herself again. The work is rooted in helping women who have given everything to their leadership and their legacy find their way back to themselves not by abandoning ambition, but by sustaining it differently.
Grice is still running her business. She is still operating in an industry that was not built with her in mind. But she is no longer doing it at her own expense. The shift, as she describes it, was not from ambition to rest it was from surviving to sustaining, from performing strength to actually living it.
It did not happen in a boardroom. It happened under a tree.
Jackie B. Grice is the CEO of J. Diamond, Inc. (dba Agape Travel and Tours), founder of Soul Sabbatical, and founder of Launching Deeper Enterprises, a coaching and business strategy firm.
